LCweb said
@SurStudio: I’m not perfect, but a perfectionist. I was talking about the theory of the “good author”.
I’ve made more than a mistake in my author life but.. hey.. 7K sales in 14 months, being a one-man-band, it’s not a joke

Maybe your support partner made troubles with customers (as is happened to me on MediaGrid and GlobalGallery)? maybe you noticed too late a bug? maybe a caching plugin (like the hateful W3 cache) has blocked some dynamic code of your item? maybe the customer uses an horrible theme full of bugs?

As Purethemes said, is very (very very very very) hard to keep 5 stars on every item, specially if you have 40/50 sales per day and at least 60 support emails every day like me.
Just a couple of 1 star ratings and your score is ruined forever.

It’s all part of the game, for everyone. But is fair.

Sorry, but I don’t think is fair

The first thing you pointed out, are issues outside the scope of our work. So, having to pay for that, is not fair.

The second thing is about not being able to provide fast/efficient support due to the sales volume. As a perfectionist, you might want to come up with a FAQ link or better documentation to not have to deal with all that. But anyway, at least you’re getting a good amount of sales. Let authors with less sales give better support and have better ratings.

BTW: Kriesi has an average of 5 stars. And almost 16% of his sales got rated.

If you take a look to serious marketplaces, they all require to write a review along with the rating. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here. Envato admits that they don’t even know what the ratings are about. At least they should be looking at those who do know, and imitate them.

SurStudio said
If you take a look to serious marketplaces, they all require to write a review along with the rating. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here. Envato admits that they don’t even know what the ratings are about. At least they should be looking at those who do know, and imitate them.

To reiterate or maybe clarify some points in my original post:

Asking for a reason with a rating is an often-requested feature. We’re looking into it, but we’re not leaping into a build like this armed only with opinions.

It’s not enough to simply look to other marketplaces for their take on ratings (although it certainly helps), and it’s not that we “don’t even know what the ratings are about” — we want to look more closely at what’s happening right now with our existing system, building up data (which we’ll be collecting through surveys and other means) to help guide great design decisions.

In the meantime, we have some ratings-related improvements that are achievable right now, support the general direction we’re headed, and the community has been asking for them for a very long time.

We prefer to ship these ASAP instead of holding off any longer. I understand that you disagree, but in this case, I think the overwhelming majority of the authors in this thread support our incremental approach.

justinfrench said
We prefer to ship these ASAP instead of holding off any longer. I understand that you disagree, but in this case, I think the overwhelming majority of the authors in this thread support our incremental approach.

justinfrench said
We prefer to ship these ASAP instead of holding off any longer. I understand that you disagree, but in this case, I think the overwhelming majority of the authors in this thread support our incremental approach.

So, lets say that the overwhelming majority are 64 (everybody else but Kriesi). Lets remind what he said:

Kriesi said
Sounds nice
Only thing I am wondering: If you need a rating of 4.76 or higher to get a 5 star, will there be any 5 star items or authors left on the marketplace?

Is Kriese opinion more important than others? Well, I do not know. I guess it should matter somehow.

Counting ThemeForest and CodeCanyon authors, we’re over 4,000. If we count all the marketplaces, we are over 20,000. How come 64, or even 100 (counting other threads) can decide about this? I accept the will of the majority, but I don’t think 64 people represent that.

justinfrench said
It’s not enough to simply look to other marketplaces for their take on ratings (although it certainly helps), and it’s not that we “don’t even know what the ratings are about” — we want to look more closely at what’s happening right now with our existing system, building up data (which we’ll be collecting through surveys and other means) to help guide great design decisions.

I understand this, and your good intentions. However, I can’t forget about last survey about GPL. After a few weeks of that, authors may release 100% GPL themes/plugins. I’ve checked the latest 60 themes, only 2 are 100% GPL.

So IMHO, it is enough to take a look to other marketplaces. There’s no point on reinventing the wheel.

Sorry for these complaints. I really like the Envato marketplaces!! And thanks for having a place to hold opinions, I appreciate it

“We don’t explicitly state anywhere what a buyer should be thinking about when they’re rating an item. Is it the technical quality? Aesthetics? The author’s support? Flexibility & configuration options? The author’s willingness to help with questions or customisation? The purchasing experience? The installation process? Value for money?”

Okay, now: I am aware that you will explore this with a dedicated survey. But: “The author’s willingness to help with questions or customisation”?

I sincerely hope that “willingness to help with customisation” won’t be part of that list ... Support for any faults: of course. Support with installation issues: sure, I’m a nice person. Support with customisations: please…

Other than that: sounds like exciting changes and I am happy to hear that some serious work is being done by you all. Moreover, I am relieved to hear that you are consulting with a real statistician to ensure reliability & validity. Bring it on!

ClientEngage said
Okay, now: I am aware that you will explore this with a dedicated survey. But: “The author’s willingness to help with questions or customisation”?
I sincerely hope that “willingness to help with customisation” won’t be part of that list ... Support for any faults: of course. Support with installation issues: sure, I’m a nice person. Support with customisations: please…

I like how Envato really puts a lot of thought and planning into any changes. From what I have seen so far in my short time on AJ, every change has been better for buyers and sellers alike. No knee jerk reactions here. Always good when you can get a win win situation

wait a minute, author are not required to customize items, actually are not required to provide support at all

the marketplace should highlight this fact not insinuate that we can customize items.

I saw the same issue with the support faq tab (or how is called). Please add weight to “Author doesn’t require to provide support for items” and less for “Author is willing to provide support in ten different ways”

This is not ok.

Are these changes made to improve authors and buyers experience or just to create impression for buyers that authors need to spend hours with each one of them for each item they sold?

Even this rating update, average the ratings. what difficult is this? I can write and “average rating to certain number” php function in half a day, and I’m not even a php programmer.

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